This brutal blame game pays little heed to justice in Rotherham

English Defence League member protesting outside the Rotherham council offices and police station. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

Rotherham has the unmistakable look of a depressed English town: a Bright Box, a Gregg's every 50ft, every second shop a charity shop. The last time the photographer was here, it was to do a story on the end of the high street. The last time I was here, it was to meet a man who'd had his life ruined by the Jeremy Kyle show.

And yet, possibly because it was almost the last shopping day before school starts again, it did not have the feel of a depressed town. The centre was full, people stopped to talk; when they design civic spaces in architectural models, these are the citizens they have in mind, leisurely enough to appreciate a bench, not so aimless as to go to sleep on it.

On Tuesday, Alexis Jay released an independent inquiry into the sexual exploitation of children in the city, going back to 1997. It describes horrible attacks on girls, a third of whom were known to child protection services; most of the known perpetrators were of Pakistani origin. Jay documents graphic injustices, victims ignored or arrested themselves, their parents disregarded, inexplicable failures across every conceivable agency.

Since then, "it's been a blame game, nothing else," said Rashid, a taxi driver in the town centre.

At a taxi rank in Rotherham. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

"Everybody knows this stuff is happening. There are eastern Europeans having underage sex in Clifton Park every night, the social services know, everybody knows. But they do nothing, they just wait for a scandal, and then it's Pakis doing this, Pakis doing that," said Asif, also on the cab rank.

Council officials, and notably the former Rotherham MP Denis MacShane, have said that they were too "liberal" and "leftie", they took racial sensitivities too seriously. Newspapers have fallen upon this as proof that political correctness is corrosive in its own right. "They weren't trying to protect racial sensitivities," Tariq Sadiq said. "They're protecting themselves because they didn't do their job. They don't realise how much we have to go through just to get to work."

At the other end of town – two minutes away – the English Defence League has been camping outside the police station since Wednesday. Its aim, in the first instance, is to force the resignation of Shaun Wright, the police and crime commissioner for South Yorkshire. But, said Ian Crossland, the 42-year-old leader of the group, "It's been 16 years, 1,400 cases. More than one man was responsible for that."

There are probably 40 people there, though there have been as many as 200 in the week. They have a little commune of tents, and a huge number of crisps. "For five years, I've been travelling around this country, telling people what's going on," said Andrew Edge, another EDL member. "I've been spat at. I've had urine poured on me. All I want to do is get the message across. Because it's not just Rotherham. Preston's got a major problem. Dewsbury is absolutely full of it, I've seen it with my own eyes".

Gail Speight is the head of the Angels, the female wing of the EDL. She says: "We came here in 2012 and did a regional demo about this, and mothers were coming up to me, when we were having the speeches, saying, 'can I speak? This happened to my daughter.' As soon as the police saw what was going to happen, they cut the sound system." The air is thick with conspiracy and conflicting accounts. I hear different versions of the same story: that a woman had spoken to them all that morning, having come in to post bail for racially aggravated criminal damage. In Edge's account, she had broken a window trying to get her seven-year-old daughter out of a house. In Speight's, she'd attacked a guy who had abused her.

The demonstration calling for the resignation of South Yorkshire police and crime commissioner Shaun Wright outside the police station on 29 August 2014. Photograph: Anna Gowthorpe/Getty Images

There is a melodramatic, febrile atmosphere that makes it impossible to take anything at face value. And yet, one thing is demonstrably true: "Can you just say," said Edge, "how much support we've had? We've had people turning up with food, with cigarettes. This is off, like, nice people, not the people you're thinking. Right now a sandwich shop just brought us more than we could eat." I saw the sandwiches. I heard cars beep in support. Nice cars, not the cars you think.

"Politics will never get you anywhere," said Phil, an evangelist, walking past with Wendy. "They need Jesus." "What are the EDL doing anyway?" Wendy said. "The problem isn't just Muslims, it's all these immigrants, coming in." It comes to something, when people are complaining that the EDL aren't racist enough.

Steve, 51, having a cigarette outside his office, is appalled – by the EDL, by the surge in support for Ukip (which gained nine council seats in the last local elections). "You live here all your life, and you never know that there's such support for this type of politics."

The abuse of all those girls has become a catalyst, a Franz Ferdinand event, the trigger for something brutal and destructive. How much does it have to do with justice, with recompense, with preventing abuse in the future? I don't think very much.

• This article was amended on 1 September 2014 to clarify that Denis MacShane is a former Rotherham MP rather than a council official.

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